You can’t goose him into badmouthing the traditional foodstuffs of any culture, either.

True to form, the TV host of “Bizarre Foods” was a likable, wicked-smart culture defender last Friday.

We met in the dining room of George’s California Modern. Zimmern had just wrapped up a shoot with George’s exec chef Trey Foshee and some sea urchin. (The show about San Diego’s “bizarre” eats filmed at a handful of local spots, airs on the Travel Channel show this August.)

Over an iced double espresso, Zimmern made his efforts to eat through the animal kingdom sound like a televised seminar on cultural diversity, eco-diversity, and big-think sustainability ideas.

About eating testicles: “It’s a great attention grabber, but that’s not why I do it. What I’m interested in are the stories of people and places. And the best lens for understanding culture is food. I think the most interesting stories as a storyteller, as a writer, even from my years as a chef, (are) stories from the fringe.”

So for the “Bizarre Foods” demo reel, before the 2006 TV pilot, Zimmern ate elk testicles on a farm in southern Minnesota.

He’s since eaten sex organs around the world…including the gonads of our locally caught sea urchins. Those sex parts are often called uni on menus, and you’ll find them most often in sushi restaurants.

“I remember in the ‘60s there was one Japanese concept and what a big deal Benihana was,” Zimmern said.

Then sushi exploded in America – what Zimmern describes in one breath as “the most obsessively popular food that exists in our country right now, which is essentially a Japanese snack food, a throwback to another century, created by gamblers for gamblers.”

Now for a primer on San Diego’s sea-urchin business: “Thirty five years ago there were a handful of urchin divers who started companies like Catalina Offshore Products and now it’s a many tens-of-million dollar industry,” said Zimmern.

He’d gotten the straight dope from Linda Vista’s Catalina Offshore Products earlier that day, when he filmed at the seafood wholesaler.

“They got into the urchin business because of all the demand overseas,” Zimmern continued his uni-as-sushi thesis.

“100 percent of their product was going to Japan the first year that they started Catalina Offshore Products. Now there’s enough demand for it here in this country. That’s keeping an American product in America for Japanese cooks to utilize – and non-Japanese like Trey (Foshee, the head chef at George’s, who’d made a seafood cocktail with uni broth).

Who's serving uni?

Find some unusual preparations of sea urchin gonads at local restaurants, click here.

“This is an economic sustainability story for this region. It’s also a cultural sustainability story for this region.

"It’s also an environmental sustainability story for this region," Zimmern said, "because the sea urchin and the kelp have a symbiotic relationship.